3 poems by Jeremy Nathan Marks

Jeremy Nathan Marks writes, reads, teaches, researches and talks to folks about things which interest them and which interest him. He has had editorials, essays, poems and photographs published in various places in Canada, the United States and across two ponds. He makes his home as an American exile in London, Ontario, Canada. A town that, while not having a left bank or much intellectual ferment, does offer a wide selection of craft beer.

Two hats

–for Nora, my beloved daughter

God, who walked the field’s edge was mistaken by the people for a troublemaker

He wore one red hat and one black hat that really were the same hat but the workers to his right and the workers to his left didn’t know there was a difference

So the God laughed and the workers argued and my daughter asked daddy why do they fight when there are muddy puddles as many as there are drops of rain in the sky

‘I have a good idea,’ she says piling several hats onto her head

Leading me to the yard I am made to stand and face her ‘See, you can see both hats’ so how could anyone fight?

Why(?) is a statement not a question and answers are just further questions

Like that God in two hats the God, a God or just God a trickster leaving stories of teething, first words, night terrors and potties told in a tangled vernacular so mischievous the storyteller is a face framed by curling blond locks.

Shangri-La (or my father takes his vacation)

I

When I was a young kid my father had but one week off per year which he preferred taking in the summer since then it could serve as a form of childcare

This was in the mid-1980s not an idyllic time for my father: when he was hired by the US Government in 1980 and promised a raise Ronald Reagan’s victory nearly quashed this promissory; even though the contract had been duly signed the Supply Side budget of 1981 froze the escalator of incremental federal raises

And wouldn’t you know that my parents first time home buyers had just entered a five year mortgage at the then standard interest rate of 18%

Thank you, Paul Volcker.

II

Every August back then we’d set out for Pawtucket, Rhode Island in our cobalt blue 74’ Olds (bought used) its white vinyl bench seating hot enough to scald our thighs from May to September it had an air conditioner that took a freon charge

A beast of a machine it took leaded gasoline and choked the air with particulate matter since, like every pre-77’ model it lacked a catalytic converter.

We’d motor up from Aspen Hill, Maryland hoping to reach Little Rhody and my grandparents’ -his folks’- home for less than the price of one full day the cost you’d pay for taking I-95 and its mandated Federal Speed Limit of 55 (MPH)

A trip that now would likely take seven eight hours tops frequently took ten back then and not just on account of the low posted speeds but because there were far more tollbooths in that pre-digital age.

In an era long before the E-Z Pass was invented when Turnpikes dotted Delaware, New Jersey, New York and Connecticut the trip felt impossibly long while my father -for his own reasons- had a way of extending its duration on account of his loathing of the more direct line through New York City

When we were within sight of Staten Island he would turn off onto the Garden State Parkway in order to bypass the bridges and tunnels fronting Manhattan convinced that anything anything was faster than taking the Bruckner through the Bronx

I suspect this was the result of two assumptions: the first being that New York City was in his imagination a metropolis of intractable backups while the second contention might have been those embedded tales of Gotham’s decay: skyrocketing crime public urination graffiti covering the subway cars

It was, even then, they said, an ‘ungovernable city’: Broken Windows, James Q. Wilson, neutered police, liberals and all that-

III

My dad must have had heroic patience since once we hit Jersey traffic would slow literally at the foot of the Delaware Memorial Bridge and pick up but little until we hit Metuchen

The Garden State which I’ve mentioned was its own hell: that litany of booths every seven miles with their asinine 35 cent fares which could be replaced by a single state-sold token but if you didn’t live in-state this was not a practical option.

To pass the time I’d recite to myself in silence the names of familiar Essex, Bergen and Passaic County cities: Newark, Clifton, Fairlawn, West Orange, Patterson and then Paramus at last (with its mall) where the congestion would thin and the New York State line loomed which, with a sign of relief, we’d clear only to begin our wait for the Tappan Zee tolls that Dutch named dual span crossing the Hudson

I would press my face to the window peering down the river in anticipation of the moment when through blear white air Manhattan’s skyline would emerge all thumbs, index and forefingers of steel, concrete and glass prying apart the haze I would say look! to my sister but she wasn’t fazed since often she was enmeshed by the challenge of drawing circles on her Etch A Sketch.

On the opposing Hudson shore we’d move through Westchester past White Plains to skirt Pound Ridge finally touching Stamford: New England at last! But we weren’t in the homestretch yet since the fun of the John Davis Lodge awaited Connecticut’s special contribution to that unbroken vibration of coins-clinking-in-baskets a defining feature of Northeastern US highways.

At the outskirts of Bridgeport and in another jam I could hear my father swear softly to himself ‘I’m never doing this again’ an oath he would repeat while we would wait an hour, two hours maybe(?) to go perhaps twelve miles before getting stuck shortly thereafter in the New Haven clog

The trip now deserved the mantle of epic as it was my father’s journey to the house where he’d grown up that house on Edgemere Road the little bungalow his parents bought after the war with three quarters down: who could leave a home where you owned everything even if the town around it had ceased to be a bright destination?

IV

The final stretch past New Haven was mercifully swift; Mystic, New London and then Rhode Island at last

At the state line I’d see a welcome sign: Providence 44 miles.

Peering carefully down the highway I’d scan the horizon for that first sign of the capital’s towers back before Providence was a place New Englanders liked to come to visit and shop back when it was barren, crime ridden, ‘a dump!’ or so I was told which was why we never went there despite the fact that I always asked if we could

Since I wanted to see up close the Fleet Bank Tower an elegant old art deco structure topped off in 1928 at 111 Westminster Street the mere site of it used to cheer me inexplicably

But perhaps the thing that drew me most to downtowns was the inverse of an impulse which had pushed my father away:

As I had not lived and worked in urban America in the 1970s hadn’t had a gun pressed to my temple at a St. Louis intersection; hadn’t watched decay crumble formerly vibrant business districts and public spaces; hadn’t had the dew on my lily desiccated by the hollow echoes of promises made in the fields of urban planning, economic justice, race relations

Maybe as I had not experience the 1970s-

I would not understand my father’s unshakeable aversion to taking his family into any urban environ?

What I think I understand now more than thirty years later is that my father’s incentives were even then vastly different from mine

I remember thinking how when I grew older our rationales would converge that having a family, too, would lead me to avoid close encounters with urban centers summer vacations with children becoming daunting ordeals to be endured that filial challenge in the life of the working professional.

But this hasn’t happened.

Thinking about those days, those trips I admit how they now feed my father’s legend. Recounting my upbringing recalling his perpetual struggle for comfort I recognize not just how times have changed but that I have a particular and peculiar comfort which he never had: the assurance, I think, of not caring too much about my job.

Sure, the value of money was impressed upon me and on those Rhode Island trips I had not just he but my grandfather too to school me over money’s power what it could do and how the working world was an unforgiving place so be smart, try and find a sinecure but even if you do always work, dammit! Work!

I love and respect my father but I don’t want what he had and has: a career that drives him to fret but that also has delivered a pension and reputation which have secured him vacations free from distractions now

Time shares Europe cruises National Park trips without too much worry (so I imagine) about their cost.

My father has found his Shangri-La but so have I

Mine is just a quiet shadow within his shadow as his circle is still wider than mine though I imagine how my own is closer to that dark concentric centre that is silence

Perhaps the sublime?

Autonomic

When my grandfather died we made the old familiar drive up I-95 through the many miles of turnpikes and tollbooths my father again under the wheel.

A strange unsettling calm pervaded the car as my father who had just lost his father guided our powerful Dodge Intrepid on its first actual pathbreaking mission across the many miles of uncleared corridors of grief

Grief that was his, foremost but it was ours, too.

Grief for my lost grandfather grief for my father now fatherless grief as a verb guiding our movements through the brume of deep sadness that now overlay everything

It was grief, I know for that first moment when a parent had passed something not one of the four of us had ever experienced.

I remember the sensation in my chest a feeling that my father was propping himself up without benefit of any of the non-visible supports each one of us relies upon just to carry on those invisible springs to propel us out of bed or the silent turnings of wheels of autonomic action philosophers like to call ‘Will’

All of this now a deliberate set of actions.

My mother was a prop her hand on my father’s back his shoulders offering through her fingers a warm palm of fulsome compassion

We, my sister and me, trying hard to follow her hand while she, my mother, now the appointed captain piloted the traffic of all of our emotions on their true course of compassion to him.

We, the other three: my mother, my sister, me becoming together a three legged table the meaning of family now plain since, as I said, much of the mostly benevolent force usually at work unseen in my father’s body (his soul, if you will) was now spent or in retreat meditating in a silent, recondite place: A cave? A devotee lying prone in supplication atop a 30 foot pole in some trackless desert? Job looking toward the serene blue sky asking why-

My father, he was there but he was somewhere unseen as well a place I knew then more than ever before I one day would have to go.

And when we arrived at his parents’ house (now his mother’s solely) and when I found her in her kitchen hunched over in grief at a table bereft of bread; when I felt the walls of that kitchen a room which always had bent outward to receive my grandfather’s frenetic joie de vivre (the kitchen being one of the places he always was most alive); when I felt those walls caving in upon themselves succumbing to a metaphorical withdrawal of autonomic will, crumbling from that ebb of ordinary life glorious in its gracious mundane; it was there and then that I felt the kriah of grief, of a body as rent fabric and within that garment an inner frame: the bones and muscles of my father in his ‘cassock of pain.’

This was too much to bear and my wall of reserve broke as I darted into the backyard and sobbed, a flood of tears breaching twenty years of a carefully cultivated demeanour; I felt the four legs of my own supports warp and collapse.

It was my sister who, having followed me out, reached for my shoulders and pulled me close.

We stood there, she firmer than I as she felt me cry out from the hollows of my loss

But before I struck their source a bird -a Mockingbird- began singing, shouting, imploring we pay him full attention

He was standing low on the roof just over the backdoor to the kitchen that room where my mother, my father and his mother were huddled the room I had just fled- that bird stood there for at least five full minutes and carried on looking right at us.

I ceased crying. We stood in silence- watching, waiting, wondering at this new whatness.

A song, a shout from the field that never paused and when it was over I felt the first shocks of my gracelessness pass before a peaceful awe of loss.

I reentered the kitchen strangely girded against the curtains of despair fortified by the syrinx, perhaps the gizzard of a tiny creature bolder than death.